Chromosome as oncogenic organizer: functional consequences of structural mutations in breast cancer (RNA-Seq)

Chromosomal structural mutations play an important role in determining the transcriptional landscape of human breast cancers. To assess the nature of these structural mutations, we analyzed a representative sampling of the major types of breast tumor samples for detailed structural mutations using paired-end tag sequencing of long-insert genomic DNA (DNA-PET) with matched transcriptome ascertainment by RNA-seq. Compared with other structural mutations, tandem duplications are enriched around partners of fusion transcripts and demarcate regions of high gene expression. Moreover tandem duplications appear to be early events in tumor evolution by facilitating subsequent downstream amplification and deletion of important adjacent cancer associated genes. In a detailed reconstruction of events in chr17, we found large unpaired-inversions connect a duplicated ERBB2 with neighboring 17q21.3 amplicons while simultaneously deleting the intervening BRCA1 tumor suppressor locus. Using siRNAs in breast cancer cell lines, we showed that the 17q21.3 amplicon harbored a significant number of weak oncogenes that appeared consistently co-amplified in primary tumors. Down-regulation of BRCA1 expression augmented the cell proliferation in human normal mammary epithelial cells. Finally, using in silico approaches, we determined that genes whose expression in breast tumors are associated with either poor or good clinical prognosis appear clustered together in segments of frequent amplification or deletion, suggesting that structural abnormalities induce the loss or gain of blocks of adjacent genes with oncogenic or growth suppressor function. These analyses suggest that structural mutations efficiently orchestrate the gain and loss of cancer gene cassettes that engage many oncogenic pathways simultaneously. RNA sequencing of four primary breast cancer RNA samples (SOLiD, Applied Biosystems).